Overview

Poetry: Getting In, Getting Out

In this two-part workshop, we’ll focus on how to begin a poem, and how to end it. We’ll generate new work over the course of the workshop sessions, and we’ll look together at what we’ve created, giving and receiving feedback. There will be a series of prompts focused on beginnings and endings of poems, but we won’t neglect the arc of how you get from one to the other—the body, the middle of the poem, the journey itself. Our discussion and workshop will be inspired partly by readings drawing from contemporary and ancient poetry produced by poets all over the world. Our goal: to understand how to write riveting first lines, or poem openings, the kinds your reader can’t look away from, the kind that pull them at a gut level right into the rest of the poem—as well as how to write that most challenging thing of all: a perfect and effective final note to a poem.